#TBT Residency Time!

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Next week, I’m off to Fredonia State University of New York as a guest lecturer for a two-day residency. I was delighted to receive an invitation from the Ethos New Music Society, a presenting organization established at the State University of New York at Fredonia, to discuss how composers and performers can not only survive, but thrive, in the contemporary performing arts field. I’m sure a follow-up article will happen after …

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Sometimes I Scare Myself

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I’m honored and humbled to be at the center of Joe Patti’s 58/2013 Butts In The Seats article titled “It Only Appears A Mockery of Reality” where he harkens back to a series of Adaptistration posts from 2004 and 2006. Patti drills down on a series of Mock Negotiation exercises I conducted for the MBA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration and Eastman School of Music’s …

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Mock Negotiations: Contrasts & Comparisons

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After completing the mock negotiation session with the MBA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration program, my mind wandered into contrast and comparison mode and I began to think about what just transpired with the UW-Madison students and how music performance students from the Eastman School of Music responded to a similar mock negotiation session I conducted with them in 2004… I want to preface this …

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UW-Madison Mock Negotiation Reflections Part 2

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Continuing where things left off in Part 1, the MBA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration program were serving as the orchestra musician negotiation committee in a mock collective bargaining agreement negotiation. After receiving some very bad news about their fictional orchestra’s financial conditions and a subsequent initial proposal from the management to reduce overall expenditures by 35%, the students on the negotiating committee refused to …

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UW-Madison Mock Negotiation Reflections Part 1

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There’s nothing quite like looking at the business from a different perspective. Even more stimulating is when those perspectives come to you from unexpected sources. Such was the case with the mock orchestra collective bargaining agreement negotiations I conducted with the MBA students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration program… Regular Adaptistration readers might remember that I conducted a similar exercise with students from Eastman School of …

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